Alleghany County, North Carolina / Whitehead / Air Bellows / Blue Ridge Mountains / mountain music / and so on. An open journal of one person in one place in one time.

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Sunday, September 30, 2012

RETURN TO WATERFALL ROAD

giacometti

I woke this morning with the same thinking I went to sleep with. I've come up against two stone walls and don't know how to get past them. One of them was that I can't write on this site for it cutting off after every phrase. Now it's working. What's up? I went over to wordpress and it was worse. I wrote a complete page, clicked on publish and it all went away. Wrote another and clicked on publish; only two paragraphs appeared. I can't do that anymore. Now that this site, blogger, is working, I suppose I can trust it to work from here on. My head is in a spin after deciding to stop writing because this site doesn't work, and now it works. Just now sent a thanks feedback to whoever is working the site.

I went to Charleston on a 4-day trip, one day going, one day coming home and 2 days there. Quite a beautiful city now. It's always been beautiful, but in its present incarnation the city is as beautiful as it has ever been, and then quite some more. I thought of Vada, a year old, everything new to baby. I went back to where I'd lived 35 years ago and it felt good. I was like a baby in that I'd lived long enough to see the city change radically to the point it was as new for me as seeing it the first time. Much was familiar, of course, and the familiar was new too.

After 35+ years living in the country, I can't go back to urban thinking. One problem is everyone there is middle class to upper middle class. I am so at home in the working class that the people of the middle class are of another culture, another world, a totally different way of thinking from living in the mountains. It was an enjoyable couple days visiting friends and eating at restaurants with middle class food was interesting. One major difference is that in the middle class having a drink of liquor is not only acceptable, but pretty much required. In the working class you're a drunk if you touch a drop of liquor. When my mother found me with a smile on my face after three beers, she had to wipe it away with an hour long lecture telling me I'm an alcoholic, beating it into my head with intent that I never forget I'm an alcoholic. I sat there bored out of my mind telling myself I am not an alcoholic, because I know. Three beers do not make an alcoholic. They don't even make a drunk.

My friend Eric, who lives in Portland, grandson of Ted Stern in Charleston, flew East and rented a car. Stern is 99 years of age, in good health and clear mind. At 99, he's kind of on the diving board to the spirit world and he's comfortable. No fear of death. Ready to take the deep plunge when it's time. Eric I've known since he was a child. On this trip, 4 days with Eric after not seeing him for several years, I was happy to see that by age 50 he has become a complete human being. He attributes finding his true self to me, the one who pointed the way for him, but he's the one that did it. The child Eric was bouncing off the walls constantly and watching tv at the same time. He lived in the television throughout his childhood. I liked him as a kid, but couldn't get him away from the television long enough to get to know him. I saw a real person in there and set out over the years to draw it out into the open.

I've been hard on him like a parent sometimes, hard on him like a friend. He was a difficult teenager. Through his twenties he was a wreck. Started self-examination in his thirties and came through fascinated by what he was discovering in New Age wisdom passing through, took up with Laura and is now getting on with his life in Portlandia. I'm happy to see him living a good life by his own terms now. Eric is good people. I'm happy he's my friend. It is interesting to me to watch somebody grow up, then when he's grown up, to hear him tell his life that I didn't see at all. It was the difference between objective and subjective. I was looking at his life from outside himself, and he was telling me the story of his life from inside himself. It was like reading William Faulkner.

So I'm back in cyberworld after some time away. I didn't take the laptop to continue while away from home, but it was in the time blogger wasn't working and there was nothing I could do but question whether I'm ready to let this everyday writing go. I didn't feel like I was, but after the wordpress experience, came to the conclusion that I have no choice but to let it go. I get up this morning and like a miracle it's working. I find after deciding to let it go, which I did not feel good about, having it back is a good, happy feeling. That tells me that I do, indeed, intend to carry on.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense,up to that point it has not got a sense,its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

---PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

---BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Brace yourself. The American Empire is over and the descent is going to be horrifying.

---Chris Hedges

Start learning to love by loving the people you cannot like. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity, the more you forget your self and when you forget yourself completely, you find God.

---Meher Baba

GO GREEN WITH BLUEGRASS.IT'S NATURAL.

---TIM WHITE, banjo the VWBoys

DEATH CANNOT HARM MEMORE THAN YOU HAVE HARMED ME,MY BELOVED LIFE.

---Louise Gluck, from her poem OCTOBER

THROW ENOUGH STONESAND YOU BUILD A WALL.

---Carole Roberts

STAY AWAY FROM IMPORTANT PEOPLE.

---Wiley Maxwell Jr

A THROW OF THE DICE WILL NEVER ABOLISH CHANCE.

---Man Ray

GOD DOES NOT PLAY DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE.

---Albert Einstein

American old-time music quarterly

The beliefs and opinions of a person often constitute a very superficial layer of the human psyche. They do not have any integral relationship with the deeper psychic forces. They remain in one region of the mind without bringing about any radical changes in the core of personality, which determines the attitude to life.

---Meher Baba

Justice is what love looks like in public.

--- Cornell West

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

---Leo Tolstoy

The mountains don't lie to you; they stand for the things that don't change, that stay true to themselves. They've been around a hundred million years and they'll be around a good while more, I reckon. They keep you humble. They put you in your place.

An excellent catalog of music from the Central Blue Ridge

There are more love songs than anything else.If songs could make you do somethingwe'd all love one another.

---Frank Zappa

on playing a banjo:

WHEN YOU SCREW UPTRY TO COVER IT UPLIKE A CAT.

---Wiley Maxwell, Jr.

ACTION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN PRAYER.

---Dalai Lama

THE WHOLE SECRET LIES IN CONFUSING THE ENEMY SO HE CANNOT FATHOM OUR REAL INTENT.

Sun TzuThe Art of War

WE'LL KNOW OUR DISINFORMATIONPROGRAM IS COMPLETE WHENEVERYTHING THE AMERICAN PEOPLEBELIEVE IS FALSE.

---Wm Casey CIA Director 1981

In this unbroken intense booming symphony, suddenly there is the tinkling of a bell so faint that I almost think I am hearing things. It is like the trembling cry of a cicada on a late autumn night. It is so ephemeral, so delicate, so pitiful, yet it is so distinct and clear above the chaotic booming of the drum that it is unmistakable.